Presentation Outline

The Workshop: The advent of the Web and the Internet has had a major impact on industry, commerce and community. Starting off online sales, marketing and customer services, to mass deployment and ubiquitous use by engineering, manufacturing, resources and oil and gas firms, it moved away from the initial function of the web as a means of dissemination of information to the following recently exciting development:

The next generation of web will have a profound and significant effect on industry, commerce and communities. These advances will have a critical impact on the competiveness and viability of industry and commerce.

DEBII: The Digital Ecosystems and Business Intelligence Institute is a Tier 1 Centre of Research Excellence at Curtin University focusing on application of cutting edge ICT techniques in several areas including business, resources, oil and gas, health informatics, education, tourism and finance sector. DEBII has brought together a group of leading world experts from industry and academia to talk about the implications of the next generation web and the challenges for our companies, industry, commerce and R&D.

This is a remarkable time in human history. Our real world is rapidly becoming digital and our digital worlds are rapidly becoming real. Ubiquitous digital worlds such as online shopping and auctions, stock and equity trading systems, electronic banking, social networks, and the e-‘s (e-government, e-health, e-commerce, e-business) contribute to our rapidly expanding Digital Universe that is as fascinating in the 21st Century as the physical universe was in the 20th Century. Digital worlds have an enormous, and far from understood, impact on our real world. The growth, adoption, and power of these digital worlds and the amazing opportunities and threats that they offer suggest a forthcoming Digital Industrial Revolution. Our Digital Universe is leading to fundamental changes in human endeavors – how people interact, science and business is conducted, and governments operate, leading in turn to planned and unforeseen consequences such as universal and instantaneous access to information and other resources, globalization of enterprises and industries, as well as economic crises, and threats to security and civil liberties. No longer do computer systems provide back-office, administrative support; they are emerging as digital ecosystems of automated and human agents that operate real business, social, and government processes; thus creating digital worlds that are an integral part of our real world. Yet we build them with little understanding of these digital worlds or their impacts on our real world. This talk explores the need for fundamental change in the conception, design, development, and use of digital worlds, to work holistically with new multi-disciplinary and collaborative methods across the relevant problem and technical domains. The need for these methods will be illustrated in the context of bold and praiseworthy efforts such as the Future Internet and Digital Ecosystems that aim at creating powerful platform technologies to build and operate future digital worlds. These technical solutions must be developed to meet the needs of the digital worlds that will operate on them rather than vice versa. Creating holistic and collaborative methods that facilitate problem solving across technical, social, and other domains to develop secure, realistic, and robust digital worlds is a grand challenge, one worth aspiring to even if it cannot be achieved quickly.

Prof. Robert Meersman New Wine in Old Bags: Semantic Web Not For Dummies

Ontologies are the key enabling resource for the meaningful deployment of information in open environments such as the WWW, and as such have been the focus of much of Semantic Web R&D efforts in the past decade. At a very early stage the Semantic Web R&D agenda put forward by Berners-Lee became dominated by RDF (which is not a semantics technology) and description logics (which is not a scalable technology), promoted by an AI community tunnelling upwards through the layers of the Berners-Lee SW "cake". Happening in parallel, the high media profile of SW created a real demand from industry for possible solutions based on domain semantics, viz. systems driven by real ontologies storing relevant lifesized business domains. This creates an obvious impedance mismatch between the slowly upwards developing SW "technology" and the rapidly downwards emerging ad-hoc semantic "solutions", usually specific to a single given business domain. Enterprises that today want to deploy IT activity on "the" semantic web are confronted with multiple such "webs" tunneling downwards, and must face the relative unfamiliarity of the research community with the legacy data problem and with real issues of scalability. It should therefore not be surprising that closer inspection today of so-called ontologies reveals that more often than not these are just their author's (extended) data model for a particular, a priori known, application that such author has in mind. Ontologies as computer-based repositories of a domain's semantics however should not be bound to the context of a single "application". It must express a form of community-based agreement, in an "application-independent" language, on the concepts, relationships, events, rules and processes present in that domain, according to that community. Agreements therefore imply (virtual) communities of users and/or developers that collaborate towards a shared, and formal, understanding. This evolution now clearly begins to mesh with Web 2.0, that other important, likely even existential, development of the internet into a participatory environment and resource. This talk will scientifically re-examine the choices made to date in the development of "a" semantic web, and to investigate the use of different techniques, inspired by -but distinct from- the tried-and-tested methods and tools from semantic database modeling, such as DOGMA Framework (Developing Ontology-Grounded Methodology and Applications) in VUB STARLab, it grounded by the theoretical foundations of ontologies and of collaborative ontology engineering based on natural language techniques and on the fundamentally evolutionary nature of ontologies as agreement resources. I will discuss a tool suite (recently spun off in a venturecapital funded company, Collibra in Brussels) that implements some of these principles such as scalability and involving noncomputer trained domain experts.

Prof. Hai Zhuge The Web Resource Space Model 2.0

This talk introduces two semantic models for effectively managing Web resources: the Resource Space Model and the Semantic Link Network Model. The integration of the two models and the research plan of The Web Resource Space Model 2.0 will also be introduced.

Prof. Tharam Dillon Chair of the Panel Discussion on the Impact of the next Generation of the Web

Biography of the speaker

Dr. Michael L. Brodie is Chief Scientist of Verizon Services Operations in Verizon Communications, one of the world's leading providers of communications services. Dr. Brodie works on large-scale strategic Information Technology opportunities and challenges to deliver business value from advanced and emerging technologies and practices. He is concerned with the Big Picture, core technologies, and integration within a large scale, operational telecommunications environment. Dr. Brodie holds a PhD in Databases from the University of Toronto and has active interests in the Semantic Technologies, SOA, and other advanced technologies to address secure, interoperable web-scale information systems, databases, infrastructure and application architectures. Dr. Brodie has authored over 150 books, chapters, and articles and has presented over 100 keynotes or invited lectures in over 30 countries. For more information see: michaelbrodie.com.

Prof. Robert Meersman, is a Full Professor at VUB since 1995. Founded the Semantics Technology and Applications Research Laboratory (STARLab) there. Director of STARLab since. Hold positions in University of Antwerp (UIA, 1975-78), Control Data Corp. (Data Management Lab, Brussels, Belgium, 1978-83). Founded the InfoLabs at University of Limburg (Belgium, 1983-86) and at University of Tilburg (The Netherlands, 1986-95) and Chair of Databases. Holder of numerous EU projects (FP4-FP7) involving applications of these subjects, and in STARLab's spinoff company Collibra (2008). Member and Past Chairman (1983- 1992) of the IFIP WG2.6 on Database. Past Chairman of the IFIP TC 12 (Artificial Intelligence, 1987-92), current Chairman of TC 2 (Software Theory and Practice). Co-Founder of the International conference series on Cooperative Information Systems (CoopIS, since 1994, now part of OnTheMove Federated Conferences). President of the non-profit Distributed Objects Applications Institute (DOAI, since 2000) that hosts OnTheMove. Invited and keynote speaker at many international conferences and events.

Prof. Hai Zhuge, a professor at the Institute of Computing Technology of Chinese Academy of Sciences. He is the Chief Scientist of the China National Semantic Grid Research Project, a prestigious project of the National Basic Research Program of China (3 million US$), the chief scientist and the former director of the Key Lab of Intelligent Information Processing of Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the founder of the China Knowledge Grid Research Group, which has hosted over 30 young researchers and research students. He has major contribution to the Knowledge Grid area on establishing its methodology, Resource Space Model, Semantic Link Network model, and Knowledge Flow Network model. He edits seven journal special issues on relevant topics and initiates the international conference on Semantics, Knowledge and Grid SKG. His monographs The Knowledge Grid and The Web Resource Space Model are the first books in respective areas. He is the author of over eighty papers appeared mainly in leading international conferences and journals such as Communications of the ACM, IEEE Computer, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, and ACM Transactions on Internet Technology.

Prof. Tharam S Dillon is internationally recognised and eminent research Professor in ICT for Business, Health, Industry and Commerce. He is a Fellow of IEEE, and Chair for the Technical Committee of Industrial Informatics for IEEE Industrial Electronic Society. He is head of the IFIP International Task Force WG2.12/24 on Semantic Web and Web Semantics, and the IEEE/IES Technical Committee on Industrial Informatics. He has published 12 books, 650 research papers as book chapters, in journals, and in international conferences. He was Dean for the Faculty of IT at the University Technology Sydney. His research has received over 2,500 citations with a Hurst index of 24 (Google scholar). His research has made significant contributions to a number of application areas including logistics, banking and finance, electrical power systems, telecommunications and management.